Stopping Small Wars

At the very moment U.N.'s Dag Hammarskjold started his delicate peacemaking mission in the Middle East, the U.S. gave him a tremendous boost on his way. In a pivotal policy statement issued last week at Augusta, Ga., President Eisenhower pledged "support in the fullest measure" for Hammarskjold and for the whole principle of working through U.N. to prevent a new Palestine war. With such emphatic backing, as well as a mandate from the U.N. Security Council, Hammarskjold went into action last week clothed with far greater authority than that of a skilled international bureaucrat trying to be helpful. The first results were promising.

He began by getting the Egyptian and Israeli Premiers to agree to honor the 1949 armistice clause prohibiting any "warlike acts" against each other. Flying into Cairo just as Dictator Gamal Abdel Nasser launched reprisals against Israel for the bloody cannonade at Gaza (TIME, April 16), he achieved a stoppage in the fighting within 24 hours (see below). Though Hammarskjold himself was characteristically uninformative in public, Cairo reported that he won Nasser's agreement to a plan for reducing border tensions, mainly by creating a buffer zone extending 550 yards on either side of the frontier, within which U.N. military representatives would patrol. Israel's Premier David Ben-Gurion had turned down such an idea of Nasser's before, but now was reported agreeable. From Ben-Gurion, Hammarskjold next wanted a written pledge that no troops would be ordered across Israel's frontiers.

Involving Russia. The U.S. decision to give Hammarskjold emphatic backing was a new and unexpected turn. It was more than just a playing for time while the Western powers figured out what to do next. At first London cheered Eisenhower's message unreservedly, reading it as a sign that the U.S. was at last taking a properly urgent view of the Middle East crisis. A second reading brought misgivings: in taking the issue to U.N.. President Eisenhower was by omission downgrading the 1950 Tripartite Declaration by which Britain. France and the U.S. agreed to, take immediate "action both within and outside the United Nations." against any violations of the Palestine armistice lines.

Invoking the Tripartite Declaration at this point was in fact no pleasant prospect. In effect, it might involve moving U.S. airmen and marines into the Middle East and telling them, "Get set to go into battle. We'll let you know shortly which side you'll be fighting." But the key reason for relying instead on the U.N. (though the State Department would not say so) appeared to be a desire to bind Russia to help keep the peace. Russia is already involved irresponsibly in the Middle East by the sale of arms to Egypt; the need was now to involve her responsibly in the Middle East as well, by making her one of the guarantors of peace.

Pundit Walter Lippmann, who rarely finds much to cheer in the Eisenhower-Dulles foreign policy, called the new policy "surely right." Wrote Lippmann: "The threatened Palestinian war is just the kind of war that the U.N. is designed to prevent. The U.N. recognizes in the veto provision the fact that if the great powers themselves are in direct conflict, the U.N. can do nothing more than attempt to conciliate. But where only small powers are involved, it is possible to limit if not to prevent war, provided the Big Five concur. Working through the U.N. . . . fixes the fact that the Soviet Union has a solemn responsibility for the prevention of war. It is the part of wisdom not to have the Soviet Union operating from the outside and with a free hand, publicly accountable to no one."

Despite the depths of hatred in the Middle East, the conviction spread at week's end that both Egypt and Israel would find an advantage in pledging good behavior to Dag Hammarskjold. But how long would such a guarantee last? The British believe that the eventual danger is from Egypt, once it has absorbed and mastered its Communist weapons, but that the immediate threat is from an Israel tempted to start something before that day comes.

Assuring Israel. Last week, breaking nearly a year's silence on world events, 81-year-old Sir Winston Churchill sought to assuage Israel's fears. Said he, with a flash of his old rhetoric: "If Israel is dissuaded from using the life force of their race to ward off the Egyptians until the Egyptians have learned to use the Russian weapons with which they have been supplied and the Egyptians then attack, it will become not only a matter of prudence but a measure of honor to make sure that they are not the losers by waiting."

Churchill also sought to assure a Conservative Party audience that "a wise and experienced'' American people have learned from history, and would act to preserve peace. "They know well that both the great wars which have darkened our lives and disheveled the world could have been prevented if the U.S. had acted before they began." In the end, said Sir Winston, "I think we can be sure that the U.S. as well as the United Kingdom will intervene to prevent aggression by one side or the other. For my part, I put my trust in President Eisenhower that he will make the will power of America felt clearly and strongly--and felt in time."

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